On Sunday morning, Max drove with us in his Oldsmobile Alero to the Palm Beach County Jail. Max was, I guessed, what people often called medium build and with flat cheeks that made him appear younger than he looked. He glanced at me every minute to make sure that I was not in tears and to keep my spirit up. Soon, he addressed my little brother, Sam, who slumped in the backseat, still bewildered and fretful since the day before. Sam’s PlayStation Portable, which was always like a magnet in his hands ever since he had received it for his birthday, was nowhere to be seen now. “Don’t worry, Sam. It’s gonna be okay. It’ll be just fine.”

Sam did not answer at first. But Max’s voice brought about a half-smile to my glum-looking face.

“Wanna hear some music?”

“No, I don’t want any music. Don’t people go to trial for that?”

Startled by the question, an uncomfortable pause went by before Max spoke again, trying to put Sam’s mind at ease. Me—I just wanted to get there fast to see my father. However, the car moved like a slow, sick sea turtle on the beach, struggling to make it back to the ocean. Not knowing what to expect, Sam started to cry when we arrived at the parking lot.

We had waited less than five minutes inside the building when Sam yelled, “There goes Dad over there!” He pointed at our father, escorted by a guard to sign some papers. For a moment, it seemed as though my father did not recognize that it was Sam. When I ran into his strong arms in my little white dress to hug him, he released a moderate smile to reassure me that he was fine. Mango stains could still be seen on his clothes.

“Yvonne, my little princess. How y’all doin’?”

“Aw, Dad, I’m so sorry for what happened to you. It’s all Topper’s fault and those stupid mangoes.”

“Don’t blame the mangoes,” he said. “It’s my fault too. I got carried away. The good thing is this nonsense won’t happen again.” After expressing his sincere gratitude to Max, he took my hand, and we headed for the exit.

My father, who Max thought looked like Shaquille O’Neal’s older brother but shorter, had always been a hard worker who put family first. The only thing that changed about him was losing his temper, at times, ever since my mother had drowned in the waters of Hurricane Katrina. Sometimes, he would talk about it almost nonstop—how it was his fault for taking too long to help carry her on top of the roof of our submerged house after he had saved me and my brother. This kind of anger would become even more apparent in his demeanor after we had moved to Palm Beach County two years ago. Such exasperations could even be reflected in the way he handled, for instance, the mangoes that grew in abundance in the yard between spring and summer.

Sam would be so nervous—watching my father chomp and peel the fruits with a sharp knife in such an awkward, menacing way—that he could never entertain such scenes. On the other hand, I did not mind keeping my father company. Most of the time, I would play under the mango trees, watching him eat even though I was not too fond of such fruits.

*** 

Two days earlier, around noon, Sam and I were on our way to Max’s house a few blocks down the road when we first met Topper. He was in his late forties with a thick beard. He sat inside his old brown truck in the parking lot but could not stop gazing up at the mango trees in the sun with all the flaming sunset-orange-hued fruits hanging from the branches. Nettled by our unexpected presence, the austere look on my face—as if this was his house, to begin with—he climbed out of the truck, his fat belly bouncing up and down. “Sweet Francine mangoes!” he said with a Texan accent. “Used to buy them when I drove up to Austin. Expensive. You don’t find them everywhere.” Yet, we possessed not one but two of those mango trees. The biggest one stood in the front yard, the other, thirty-five feet away across the front door on the other side of the three-bedroom house. “We’re talking some rare fruits here, kids. Very hard to get.”

“Hey, I don’t wanna hear it!” I said, still studying him from head to toe, where I stood my ground in my brand-new white pair of flip-flops. “You’re not welcome here! And if you intended to impress me with your lousy know-it-all intelligence, well, I’m not.”

“Oh, come on, kid. I gave it my very best shot.”

“Cool. You should get some mangoes, then,” Sam said while playing his PSP.

I hated when Sam acted like that. I winked at him, an angry gesture, urging him to stop encouraging the stranger, but he ignored me.

Quite anxious, I watched Topper pick up a very ripe-looking mango from the grass. He held up the flat, kidney-shaped fruit and said, “when it comes to mangoes, this right here got the finest taste in the world.” With little effort, he peeled the skin before his teeth sunk into the fruit’s creamy flesh with his eyes shut. He talked about the origin of this particular mango, also known as the Madame Francis mango, that he found so dense and rich, saying that they had mostly grown on family farms in the countryside of Haiti.

“Where y’all come from all of a sudden?” Topper asked while licking the remaining mango juice around his dirty fingers. He had eaten the entire fruit in no time as though he had been starving all morning.

“What? We live here. This is our home,” I said right back to him.

It was not the first time the intruder had been on the property. My father, who slept during the day because of his full-time overnight job as a security guard at JFK Hospital, had trouble staying asleep because Topper did not always turn off his truck’s engine. My father had made several complaints about him and explained how he had almost caught Topper one time with the truck. He said Topper had just pulled away from the parking lot, but he could have pursued Topper if he had a car. Nonetheless, Max had advised that my father file a complaint against him at the police station to avoid a head-on confrontation. But my father claimed that it did not make much sense to get the police involved at this point. He insisted he wanted to see what Topper looked like first.

“You should take some,” Sam said again. “You should see the way my father eats them. My oh my.”

“Like what?”

“Just like a lion on a zebra.”

“Will you shut up?” I said.

“Is that so, little man?” Topper said with a burst of ridiculous laughter, pretending he was better than my father. Wait a minute—how could he be?

Sam followed him as he moved closer to the bloomed pastel pink and white lantana plants alongside the wooden fence. The flowers looked fresh since I had watered them three hours earlier. I put down the basket of mangoes I was bringing to Max and followed the stranger to see what he was capable of. I wanted to hit him with one of the big mangoes and chase him back to wherever the hell he came from. He had no business parading inside the fenced area like that. He inspected the far side of the yard but could not take off his eyes from the mango trees for long. He tramped over a rotten mango as he spotted a green plastic bucket sitting against the side of the off-white concrete wall. The bucket contained a mix of unripe green and ripe yellow giant mangoes that gave him the wrong impression that we had no admiration and respect for such rare fruits. He stared at the bucket a moment, wanting to know if they were left reserved for an animal.

“No,” I interrupted him.

“You gonna get some or what?” Sam asked. “My dad’s asleep.”

“Asleep?” Topper asked as if it were wrong for people to sleep during the day. Then, he took out a plastic bag from his pants pocket and unfolded it. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, though, whoever planted those mangoes around here knew a thing or two about great fruits.”

“Hey, guess what? Yvonne had written a poem about the mangoes in the fifth grade. She won a big prize. Yeah, no kidding. Just before the summer.”

“Enough, Sam.”

“That’s very nice of you, little man. Your sister, too.”

Thus, Topper reached the smallest mango tree’s low branches, picked several mangoes and dropped them inside the plastic bag. He hoisted himself over the fence to reach the bigger and riper ones. Then, he returned to the bucket and picked four mangoes from it. Flustered by his rudeness, I thought about my father’s shotgun inside the house—reserved for people like that. I viewed any inaction at this juncture as a clear invitation for him to return to the property any day, any time now. Still, when I nudged Sam for us to think of a quick ploy, Sam just shrugged and laughed. Stupid PSP. So, I just stood there, grim-faced, watching the stranger stride to his stupid, ugly truck and leave.

Much later that day, when we returned from Max’s house, I found my father in the yard in the sunset. He had raked the leaves, and everything looked delightful again. I believed that he had just finished eating some mangoes. He was not only struggling to take off mango fibers stuck between his teeth, but his clothes were stained with fresh mango juice. The green bucket had been filled again to the brim. “Goddamn it. Can you believe the son of a bitch was here again? That piece of shit.”

“Yeah, we saw him today,” I said.

“What?”

“We didn’t want to wake you up.”

“They’re called Francine mangoes. That’s what he called them—the kinds that we have,” Sam said and went inside.

“I can’t stand that guy.”

“Don’t worry. Won’t be long now before I meet him.”

I explained to my father why I despised people like Topper. If he did not stop the intruder soon before we knew it, the man would barge into the house uninvited to eat our food, drink our coffee—and God only knew what else he would be indulging in. I held nothing back.

“You’re not only pretty,” my father said, “but smart. I like that. I’m proud of you.”

After I joined him, where he sat by the front door, he produced a white rose and tucked it behind my ear. He told me that he had gotten it from the garden of our next-door neighbor. It was still hot outside, but the mango leaves carried a little breeze that made the evening look pleasing. Not long after that, I noticed a solemn, pensive look on his face. There held no doubt in my mind that he had missed my phenomenal mother—thinking about those funny family picnics we used to have in our old backyard every Sunday afternoon. For some reason, I did not want to talk about her now because I believed he had had enough.

“Where did you guys want to go this summer?” he asked.

“I don’t know. It’s okay, Dad.”

“Nah, I think you should do something fun before starting middle school. I will take some time off. Don’t want you at Max’s all the time, understand?”

I nodded, followed by the sound of laughter after he pinched my cheek. We both became quiet again. Everything felt quiet, except for the engines of trucks and vehicles alike that roared past the house. After a while, we talked about Max’s wife. “She’s always nice to us,” I said. Because she did not have any children, she enjoyed spending time with Sam and me. She would go shopping and other places with us. It did not even bother her to cook just for us. Not long ago, in my father’s spare time, he had shown me how to wash vegetables and fruits and how to peel hard-boiled eggs. However, Max’s wife had gone a step further. She taught me how to chop the onions and carrots and cut the avocados and kiwis with precision.

It was forecasted to be a pleasant weekend with the temperature at just seventy-nine degrees. So, the next day, Sam and I went to the beach with Max and his wife. It was the second weekend since our summer had begun. On our way from the beach in the afternoon, Max’s wife suggested that he drop Sam and me off at home first. However, Sam needed to retrieve the accessories for his PSP at their house, so Max did not stop. After twenty minutes or so, I grabbed the white towel I had taken with me and decided to walk home, leaving Sam watching Family Guy.

A few yards away from my house, I saw at least two mangoes that flew across the street one after another. I did not think much of anything, even though I could hear the sirens of an ambulance approaching in the distance. But then, a police car emerged at the end of the street, and I could see that it was decelerating already right in front of my house. This was in addition to the first police cruiser, which had already pulled up into the parking lot.

Not one minute gone by, another mango went flying in front of the mailbox, hitting the front of the second police car bumper. I tried to quicken my pace to find out what was going on, having a strange feeling that my father had met with Topper. My legs felt heavy just when I needed them the most. Taking off my flip-flops proved pointless. I could not escape the feeling that chaos of significant proportion was taking place at my house.

When I made it past the parking lot, the yard was strewn with mangoes and mango leaves. One of the two police officers already on the scene handcuffed my father on the ground, trying to keep him calm. The other police officer, black, talked on the police radio while Topper lay flat on the ground like an animal around a small pile of mangoes. Most of his clothes were covered in dirt mixed with mango juice. That side of the house wall was now flecked with mango flesh and juice. I stood by the fence with the towel around my neck, helpless, not knowing whether to run over to my father or remain still. Topper still lying there motionless frightened me a little. Was he dead?

Just then, my father said, “Yvonne! I got him! I got the thief just in time!”

Topper grunted. “He tried to kill—kill me with the mangoes.”

“No, shut up! You got what you deserved, you thief! He’s nothing but a goddamn thief and a liar!”

When the ambulance arrived, the police officers said Topper had several broken ribs and that it would take time for him to recover. He had to be lifted to a stretcher. Before the paramedics took him away, I turned my face away at the sight of blood dripping from his greedy mouth. Yet, I would be in denial to say that a part of me did not enjoy his defeat.

At last, I dashed to my father while the officers moved to escort him to the police car. The faces surrounding the area made me scared a little, but I knew he had done the right thing. “I got the bastard just in time, just in time,” he said again. “Don’t you worry, Yvonne. Max will be here before you know it.” In the backseat of the car, he looked straight at me. I thought perhaps he wanted me to rescue him. But again, his face relaxed with a sense of satisfaction, a rare, joyous smile I have not seen in a long time.

This was when the black police officer approached me and said, “You’re Yvonne, isn’t that correct? Look, it’s gonna be okay. We just need your father to clear a few things for us at the station. The man your father roughed up said he had made a deal with your father to buy a certain number of mangoes from him while your father told us a different story.” But when our next-door neighbor rushed over, I could hear the other police officer say that my father found himself in trouble for resisting and obstructing an officer.

I broke into tears. Before I knew it, I stumbled onto half a dozen mangoes. I kicked the green bucket that now sat empty out of the doorway and went inside my room, wiping my tears with the white towel.

Soidenet Gue is an emerging screenwriter from Florida with a penchant for writing about families. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Dillydoun Review, Bridge Eight, Maudlin House, Drunk Monkeys, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, among others. When not writing, he enjoys watching movies and reading. Find him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/soide.fred